Summary of The Wager By David Grann:A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

By Willie M. Joseph

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Summary of The Wager By David Grann:A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

 

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The Wager is a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals the deeper meaning of the events. The men were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes, told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. It follows the crew of a British warship as they fall into anarchy, with accusations of treachery and murder flying. The Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth, with the stakes being life-and-death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Apr 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223240549

Willie M. Joseph

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Prologue

The Wager was a British man-of-war that had embarked on a secret mission to capture a treasure-filled Spanish galleon. It was believed to have sunk with all its souls, but 283 days after the ship had last been reported seen, the men miraculously emerged in Brazil. Most of the officers and crew had perished, but eighty-one survivors had set out in a makeshift boat lashed together partly from the wreckage of the Wager. They traveled through menacing gales, tidal waves, ice storms, and earthquakes. The Wager's voyage was one of the longest castaway voyages ever recorded, with more than fifty men dying.

Six months later, another boat washed ashore in Chile, with three survivors who were half naked and emaciated. After returning to England, they leveled an allegation against their companions as mutineers. This controversy revealed that the Wager's officers and crew had struggled to survive in extreme circumstances, building an outpost and trying to re-create naval order, but descended into a Hobbesian state of depravity. The Admiralty summoned the principal figures from each group to face a court-martial, which threatened to expose the secret nature of the empire. Several of the accused published their sensational accounts of the expedition, which were influenced by Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Charles Darwin, Herman Melville, and Patrick O'Brian.

The suspects' main aim was to sway the Admiralty and the public, with a survivor composing a faithful narrative and the leader of the other side claiming an imperfect narrative. They believed their lives depended on the stories they told, and if they failed to provide a convincing tale, they could be hanged.

Part One

THE WOODEN WORLD

The First Lieutenant

David Cheap, the first lieutenant of the Centurion, was a Scotsman in his early forties with a burdensome story. He was in flight from squabbles with his brother over their inheritance, creditors chasing him, and debts that made it impossible for him to find a suitable bride. On the quarterdeck of a British man-of-war, he brimmed with confidence and a clarity of purpose. However, he was trapped at the dockyard in Portsmouth, struggling to get the Centurion fitted out and ready to sail. The British Empire was racing to mobilize for war against its imperial rival Spain in January 1740.

George Anson, the captain under whom he served on the Centurion, had been promoted to commodore and lead the squadron of five warships against the Spanish. Anson was a formidable seaman with a mastery of the wooden world and a mastery of himself. He had attracted a coterie of talented junior officers and protégés, all vying for his favor. If Anson succeeded, he would be in a position to anoint any captain he wanted, and Cheap, who had initially served as Anson's second lieutenant, was now his right-hand man. David Cheap's father had a large estate in Fife, Scotland, and his motto was Ditat virtus.

His half brother James inherited the bulk of the estate, leading to his upheaval. David apprenticed to a merchant, but his debts mounted. In 1714, he ran off to sea, but his journey was uneventful and he was sent to patrol the West Indies. He earned the trust of Anson and worked his way up to first lieutenant. Samuel Johnson observed that no man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail.

The War of Jenkins' Ear was a conflict between Great Britain and Spain in 1738. Robert Jenkins, a British merchant captain, was summoned to appear in Parliament and accused of smuggling sugar from Spain's colonies. This sparked the passions of Parliament and pamphleteers, leading to the War of Jenkins' Ear. British authorities devised a plan to attack Cartagena, a South American city where much of the silver extracted from Peruvian mines was shipped in armed convoys to Spain. Commodore Anson was assigned to the smaller operation.

The British government wanted to avoid the impression that it was sponsoring piracy, but the heart of the plan called for an act of outright thievery: to snatch a Spanish galleon loaded with virgin silver and hundreds of thousands of silver coins. The Admiralty had given Anson a code and cipher to use for his written communication, and an official warned that the mission must be carried out in the most secret, expeditious manner. Anson was facing his longest expedition and his most perilous, but he saw himself as a knight-errant of the sea in search of the greatest prize of all the oceans. If the squadron didn't embark quickly, he feared the entire party would be annihilated by the violent seas around Cape Horn. Seamen believed that the best chance to survive was during the austral summer, between December and February. However, since war had been declared, the Centurion and other men-of-war in the squadron had been marooned in England, waiting to be repaired and fitted out for the next journey. The Centurion had three towering masts with crisscrossing yards, three towering masts with crisscrossing yards, a double layer of planks, several decks, and two rows of cannons on both sides.

To increase the chances of surviving a barrage of cannonballs, the ship had a double layer of planks, several decks, and two rows of cannons on both sides. Augustus Keppel, a fifteen-year-old midshipman, boasted that other men-of-war had no chance against the mighty Centurion. However, building, repairing, and fitting out these watercraft was a herculean endeavor even in the best of times, and in a period of war it was chaos. Anson's vessels were laid up on Rotten Row, made from simple, perishable materials such as hemp, canvas, and timber. Teredo navalis, termites, deathwatch beetles, and fungus further devoured the ship's wooden core.

Samuel Pepys discovered that many new warships under